Here’s an interesting article. German and Swedish scientists have found a way to make artificial silk from whey protein. From Medical Design Technology:
A Swedish-German team of researchers has cleared up a key process for the artificial production of silk. With the help of the intense X-rays from DESY’s research light source PETRA III, the scientists could watch just how small protein pieces, called nanofibrils, lock together to form a fibre. Surprisingly, the best fibres are not formed by the longest protein pieces. Instead, the strongest “silk” is won from protein nanofibrils with seemingly less quality, as the team around Dr. Christofer Lendel and Dr. Fredrik Lundell from the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm reports in the Proceedings of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences.
Due to its many remarkable characteristics, silk is a material high in demand in many areas. It is lightweight, yet stronger than some metals, and can be extremely elastic. Currently, silk is harvested from farmed silkworms, which is quite costly. “Across the globe, many research teams are working on methods to artificially produce silk,” says co-author Prof. Stephan Roth from DESY who is an adjunct professor at KTH Stockholm. “Such artificial materials can also be modified to have new, tailor-made characteristics and can serve for applications like novel biosensors or self-dissolving wound dressings, for example.”
[…]
In the new study, the nanofibrils were formed by a protein from cow’s whey under the influence of heat and acid. The fibrils shape and characteristics strongly depend on the protein concentration in the solution. At less than four per cent, long, straight and thick fibrils form. They can be up to 2000 nanometres long and four to seven nanometres thick. But at an only slightly higher protein concentration of six per cent or more in the initial solution, the fibrils remain much shorter and thinner with an average length of just 40 nanometres and a thickness of two to three nanometres. Also, they are curved looking like tiny worms and 15 to 25 times softer than the long, straight fibrils.
It’s a lot cheaper to produce artificial silk from whey protein than by farming silk worms. Present strategies for making artificial silk typically start from oil which is, presumably, not a renewable resource. I don’t know what the relative costs are. Those will influence the feasibility of the approach.
It seems to me this sort of technology will be particularly interesting to countries that have substantial dairy surpluses. Like the United States, for example.
